Slow Pause explores our impact on the planet and its health. With the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak and the resultant pandemic, we saw a dramatic reduction in human travel around the globe. This resulted in the Earth vibrating less starting in the spring of 2020. Utilizing makeshift seismographs, airplane parts, tires, bleached coral and archives of the earliest writings on climate change, Bolen's newest body of work incorporates unique, material-based and site-specific recording processes to explore ways of understanding the unseen and how our patterns of movement impact the world we live in.
The works in Slow Pause are a combination of photo-based images, hybrid objects and sculptures, both wall-mounted and floor-standing, that explore how we interact with the invisible. During this time when we are all intimately dealing with the pandemic, concerns with what we can and cannot see have become quotidian and paramount. For Bolen, it is more critical than ever to consider how knowledge and truth are produced and perceived, and what tools are needed to interpret the world we live in.
These speculative works address human adaptability on an ever-changing planet. Bolen incorporates materials that have been proposed to cool the planet, using them to create dynamic works that oscillate between abstract images recording our planet's collective movement, and familiar sculptural objects that reference the human technology impacting it.